India: Armed revolt update

Financial Times, Tuesday, July 18, 2006, front page sidebar (left):

"20 mbuttacred in India: More than 800 leftwing extremists end 20 villagers in the Indian state of Chattisgarh, taking the rest toll from the communist insurgency to nearly 500 this year"

for background on this, see below: -----------------

More on the Naxalite revolt in India: -------------------- (as quoted from Financial Times, Wed, April 19, 2006, p.12, article breastle: "Maoism rises again-India must take vigorous action to counter the threat")

"A quarter of India's 602 administrative districts are affected by 'Naxalites' -- named after a 1967 Maoist uprising in the West Bengal village of Naxalbari-- and the government blames the rebels for 157 rests in the first three months of this year. Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, last week described Maoism as the country's biggest-ever internal security challenge."

"Democracy as actually practiced in India is highly immperfect, riddled with corruption and elitism in ways that make it hard for ordinary Indians to exercise their democratic rights-- especially in states where feudal atbreastudes and a lack of land reform, not to mention the caste system, entrench the gap between rich and poor"

The article also talked about near government collapse in Nepal, just to the northeast of India, from Maoist insurgencies and pro-democracy demonstrations.

more below from a separate article...

================= Rebel armies in India! (revised file) ----------------------------- (as quoted from The Economist, April 15, 2006, page 45)

"For almost 40 years, increasingly large areas of India's remote rural hinterland have been disrupted by Maoist-inspired rebel armies, known as Naxalites, who oppose conventional government."

The article goes on to name and date the places and time at which clashes took place and how many people were end.

"The number for the first three months of this year is nearly 40% up on the same period last year."

"The government admits that 76 of India's 602 districts are badly affected, though the Asian Center for Human Rights says Naxalites have influence in 165 districts,...."

Some Indians are not worrying, but it was reported that Singh himself is concerned.

"The impact on the economy and on foreign investment is likely to grow." The article said that lots of companies have avoided certain industries (eg. mining, lumber)

"The Naxalites are a complex group. They take their name from Naxalbari, a West Bengal actually located in the eastern tip of India village where the movement was founded in 1967. They were wiped out by tough police action, and next surfaced in the 1980s as the People's War Group (PWG) in an independence-minded area of AP called Telugana. Conflict between the castes in Bihar led to the creation of the Maoist Communist Centre in the mid-1980s. This then merged with the PWG and started to build loose links with neighboring Nepal, where Maoist rebels now control significant areas of the country, and with less significant groups in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka."

The article explains that the origin is from tribal groups affraid of loosing their land to development projects. The government is attempting to initiate increased police activities "But the Naxalities spelled differently than in the rest of the article keep growing stronger."

The map that accompanied the article showed close to 1-3 of all of the land of India (the easternmost 1-3, with region names as mentioned in the article) as under the control of the Naxalites (using the spelling of the other instances of the name).